1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of and an apparatus for processing a packet based on double tagging a packet within a Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), a Transparent LAN Service (TLS), a Virtual Private Switched Network Service (VPSNS), or any Layer 2 Virtual Private Network (VPN). In essence, the present invention can be applied to any packet-based service provider communication network environment, such as token ring, ATM, Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. In particular, the present invention relates to a method of and an apparatus for fast-path implementation for TLS using double tagging that can be implemented on a semiconductor substrate such as a silicon chip.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the popularity and usage of the Internet grows, an increasing amount of end-users are being interconnected via the Internet. In particular, business entities, such as corporations, having multiple site-offices located in different parts of the world, are increasingly relying on the Internet to communicate with each other. For instance, a corporate entity having multiple site-offices located at geographically dispersed sites may look to a fast and efficient way using the Internet to interconnect a group of private site-offices belonging to the private corporate entity together. Accordingly, there is a need to provide a fast, inexpensive and reliable system that can offer a virtual private customer-based network wherein inter-office network connections are achieved using the fast growing Internet infrastructure, especially the Internet Service Provider (ISP).